Relijun

Wednesday, July 09, 2014

Today, Rep. Todd Rokita (R-IN) submitted a post to RealClearPolitics.com entitled “Why the War on Poverty Failed & How We Can Win It.” Let me spare you any undue excitement—he never really got around to detailing either.

Evidently. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) has stepped away from his somewhat embarrassing stint as front-man for the GOP’s “50 Years of Fail” concern trolling over the fact that, despite the War On Poverty program there are still poor people. That leaves the position open for some newbie back-benchers to cut their teeth on.

Whatever . . . Rokita has picked up the torch but appears to be having a little trouble keeping it lit. As we know from past encounters, Rep. Rokita is a bit of a wag—you might remember him as the chauvinist swashbuckler who reprimanded CNN journalist Carol Costello about her barbed questions during last Fall’s government shutdown, saying “Carol, you’re beautiful, but you have to be honest as well.”

Or that time, in 2007, when, while encouraging Republicans to appeal to more African-American voters, Rokita cited the statistic that 90% of African-Americans vote Democratic then asked:

How can that be? Ninety to ten. Who’s the master and who’s the slave in that relationship? How can that be healthy?

You get the picture . . . so Todd starts out waggish:

Fine, I admit it, you caught us red-handed—the Republican Party is the party of the “rich.”

Friday, June 20, 2014

There’s a lady lawyer in Minnesota whose long-game is to serve on the US Supreme Court but, for the time-being and God-willing, she will hone her judicial skills on the Minnesota State Supreme Court. The state Republican Delegation took a good 30 minutes to endorse Michelle McDonald after she gave a rousing, Bible-waving speech in which she promised to base her judicial opinions on Biblical principles. [First Amendment be damned!]

“. . . it is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible.”

One of the ways that Ms. McDonald hopes to impress future SCOTUS-scouts is her “radical belief that the family courts should be abolished” the result of an epiphany she experienced after serving 25 years in family court.

Citing inspiration from her clients, grandson, the film “Jerry Maguire” and Pope John Paul II, McDonald then composed a “Miracle Mission Statement” toward making that belief a reality.

Asked to elaborate on those views during the interview, MacDonald was soon overcome by emotion. “These [issues] are of great interest to me,” she said, pausing to wipe her tears, “because families are being ripped apart by our court process. I’ve seen it over the last 27 years.”

After composing herself, MacDonald confidently asserted that her latest legal salvo — part of a long and bitter custody fight between a client and her ex-husband — will be “the case that eliminates courts for families all together. It will happen in [this] case.”

Or, maybe not, if one takes into account some of the legal hijinks and courtroom histrionics that have taken place during that trial to include:

. . . a judge ha[ving] her removed from the courtroom and placed in a cell.

According to the documents, MacDonald was handcuffed, placed in a wheelchair, and then returned to the courtroom, where she continued to argue on her client’s behalf. She was, however, jailed for multiple days, though never charged.

Meanwhile, there were a series of adverse rulings in McDonald’s case, one of which was an unsuccessful bid for the case to be heard by SCOTUS. Failing that, McDonald brought a federal suit against the presiding judge seeking more than $330 million dollars in damages for her client and her client’s five children.

Not to mention:

She further claimed in the suit that John and Mary Does 1-20 — unnamed government employees who work for police agencies and the courts — “have a secret agenda intent on family annihilation, societal breakdown, intimidation, emotional abuse, isolation, using children, economic abuse, coercion and threats.” The suit does not specify the damages sought from those parties.

That suit was dismissed by a US District Judge while McDonald was auditioning for the Republican endorsement.

So, far Ms. McDonald looks like a perfect fit for the Minnesota [cough, Bachmann] GOP. More of an Orly Taitz than a Clarence Darrow . . . so, it comes as no surprise that we have an alert state Republican, Doug Seaton, of the Judicial Election Committee, telling McDonald that he was concerned:

“that we’re going to have a situation where the party’s endorsement process is going to be held up to ridicule, and you’re going to be held up to ridicule, and attacked in a campaign as not having judicial [comportment] and not being neutral and being a little bit of a wild woman.”

“How on Earth can a person who is a zealous advocate, maybe pushing the line, be suitable for a judicial position? And how is that going to reflect on the party’s endorsement process, the other statewide candidates…is that going to be a problem? How are you going to respond to it?”

McDonald demurred from answering Seaton’s questions but agreed that his concerns were valid.

And, all of that, of course is incidental to McDonald’s recent DWI arrest, trial still pending. As briefly as possible, McDonald was pulled over for speeding by police, refused alcohol testing, told the officer that she was a “reserve cop, a lawyer and would walk home” but vigorously protests her innocence.

Personally, I don’t find it astonishing that a lawyer, or a supreme court justice for that matter, might have a DWI in his/her closet.

MacDonald’s candidacy should have raised numerous red flags. But in a rush to endorse a judicial candidate, the warning signs were missed and now people are pointing fingers.

Keith Downey, chairman of the Republican Party of Minnesota told the Star Tribune last week, “none of us, including the convention delegates, were aware of this information about the candidate.”

Contrary to the statements made by Downey, MacDonald’s arrest was known by numerous Republicans, including the person appointed by Downey to oversee the committee to determine if the convention should endorse a judicial candidate – Doug Seaton.

As the former Deputy Chair of the Republican Party of Minnesota, I will state without hesitation that MacDonald’s endorsement proves the current party process of endorsing candidates is fundamentally flawed and in desperate need of reform.

The fact that Downey, the top elected official of the Republican Party of Minnesota, claims he was unaware that a candidate with a pending criminal trial was endorsed for the Minnesota Supreme Court, is the best evidence I can point to that Republicans need a new process to select candidates for office.

One could chalk Hoft’s jape up to mere sexism and racism- heh, they’re only girls, and it’s only Africa, doncha know- but I believe that the right-wing doesn’t wish to take this atrocity seriously for a more existential reason. “Boko Haram” translates as “Western Education is Sinful” and the group not only targets Nigerian Christians but Muslims who are not seen as sufficiently pure in their devotion. A similar fundamentalist group in Mali burned manuscripts in a Timbuktu library that represented centuries of Islamic jurisprudence. The Boko Haram group is a bunch of nihilists, seeking to destroy anything which doesn’t adhere to their particular narrow vision of the Islamic faith.

Here in the U.S., a commonrefrain among religiousfundamentalists is that secular education is undermining traditional American values- “western education is sinful” or, to put it succinctly, Boko Haram.

Basically, the raison d’être of Boko Haram and, for instance, the American Family Association is identical- they both want to purge their respective societies of secular values. It’s no wonder that Hoft, a right-winger through-and-through, wants to make light of the kidnapping of Nigerian schoolgirls who were slated to be sold into arranged marriages in order to “control” them. With the American Right’s mania about “purity” and the evils of secular education, one would have to suspect that Hoft would back a similar kidnapping of female students by a fundamentalist organization that would force them into “traditional” marriages- he’d just disagree about which “holy” book’s precepts were used to justify the crime.

I want to see two things happen- bring back the girls and let’s smack our churls!

Thursday, May 01, 2014

A few weeks ago, I posted an article about a state bill that had landed on Tennessee governor Bill Haslam’s (R) desk to be either vetoed or signed into law. That bill was SB 1391 which made it a crime, specifically assault, to be a pregnant illegal drug user. Most states don’t prosecute drug users, only traffickers. That’s because the law sees drug use as a medical issue, rather than a criminal one. And oceans of data confirm that treatment has a far more beneficial effect, than incarceration, on drug addiction. But that’s all about to change, in Tennessee, for female addicts who become pregnant.

In a giant leap backward, Gov. Haslam signed SB 1391, a horribly ill-conceived piece of retrograde legislation, into law, and it will go into effect on July 1, 2014. According to his signing statement, Gov. Haslam judiciously considered copious amounts of expert opinion and signed SB 1391 into law anyway:

. . . after “extensive conversations with experts including substance abuse, mental health, health and law enforcement officials. The intent of this bill is to give law enforcement and district attorneys a tool to address illicit drug use among pregnant women through treatment programs.

It would be interesting to know who those experts were, exactly, because they certainly weren’t experts from . . .

The American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and other major medical associations — joined by local doctors and addiction specialists — [who] have warned that measures criminalizing pregnant women will only discourage them from seeking prenatal care and drug treatment. These concerns were made expressly clear to the governor by groups like SisterReach, a Tennessee-based reproductive justice group and Healthy & Free Tennessee, a state-wide reproductive health coalition.

“Despite our advocacy attempts and regardless of the impact this law will have on marginalized families; despite the danger that medical professionals have noted a law of this magnitude will cause, our governor chose his party over the experts,” SisterReach founder and CEO Cherisse A. Scott said in a statement. ”This law separates mothers from their children and is not patient-centered. Tennessee families who are already being hit the hardest by policies such as the failure to expand Medicaid, poverty and a lack of available drug treatment facilities will be most deeply impacted by this bill. Mothers struggling with drug addiction in Shelby County, rural communities throughout Tennessee and poor mothers and their families will be the ones who suffer the effects of this dangerous legislation the most.”

“They’re positioning him as a Judas goat to lead the liberty movement. It all just clicked. He is actually Benedict Arnold, he actually works for Obama. And I’m sorry I have to say that. He really does!”

Poor Beck, he steals Alex Jones’ schtick, then backpedals in one instance, and now he’s Benedict Arnold. On his end, perhaps because he sees the coming backlash and his getting drummed out of the loonbertarian fringe, Beck is seeking the refuge of religious whackaloonery... because religion is the last good refuge for an utter scoundrel. Addressing the commencement of Liberty University’s graduating class, he’s gone full-on “Rapture Ready” fundagelical millennialist, claiming that God is coming back “to settle scores”.

One could chalk up Glenn’s latest “Road to Dumbasscus” moment as an example of Jerusalem syndrome, but I have a more cynical view. I suspect that Beck sees the coming Rupture among the far-righties, so he’s going to switch gears and talk about the Rapture to reinvent himself as a religious figure, having failed as a political pundit. Unluckily for him, Glenn is a couple of horsemen short of an apocalypse.

Sunday, April 20, 2014

I hope those of you who celebrated Easter today have gotten over your sugar hangover, because battle has been joined. There is now an, admittedly half-hearted/half-assed, War on Easter, declared by Fox News.

The “war” stems from a display erected in Daley Plaza by The Freedom from Religion Foundation, extolling **GASP** reason and the separation of church and state. Even worse, this “War on Easter” is **HORRORS!** unholy. What kind of unholy monsters would advocate for reason and the separation of church and state? What sort of monsters, indeed?

Those who would undermine the separation of church and state make the dubious assumption that their particular brand of church would be the established one. The Founders, with the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War still scarring the European psyche, well knew the tyranny of established religion.

As an aside, I have to laugh at the use of the word “unholy”... almost everything on the planet is “unholy”. For example, with one notable exception, hand grenades are unholy.

I think the real issue is that, for most people, the Easter eggs and bunnies, and the baskets full of candy have supplanted the religious festival to a large extent. The fundies have lost The Chocolate War so now they’re throwing a temper tantrum:

Friday, April 18, 2014

Since this story broke there has been a huge international out pouring of support for Chief Crystal Moore. There is an active petition on change.org calling for the South Carolina State Ethics Commission to investigate Mayor Bullard’s firing of Crystal Moore.

There’s a twitter campaign #StandWithChiefMoore and a gofundme.com donation page to help Chief Moore with legal costs and to tide her over while she’s off the Latta payroll.

Bullard ran uncontested last year and was installed in office in January, 2014. And Latta hasn’t been the same since then. Many elected officials are motivated to run for office because they believe that they have some good ideas for improving things and it was pretty clear, even before he took office, that Bullard wanted to make a few changes immediately.

Religious people are often characterized as humble people, but I think that’s total B.S. Every religious fundamentalist sees him-or-herself as the center of momentous events, a witness to the climax of history. In reality, each and every one of us is a tiny speck of matter on a slightly larger speck of matter, as Douglas Adams put itfar out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy, and I would add, not even a particularly distinguished galaxy at that.

We are not that important in the grand scheme of things, no matter what interpretation of an ambiguous passage in a book written by Bronze Age goatherders and passed through many translations over the course of the last couple of millennia is favored by a crazy religious fundamentalist in Texastan. Get over yourselves, fundies. Enough of this bloody lunacy.

It isn’t the highest standard in the world. Many people have avoided being a hypocritical ivory tower word-weaseling douche canoe. He just isn’t living up to that standard, and I despair of his regular attempts at self-sabotage.

So, I point to an interview, which kind of turns on a thin dime so subtly that you might have to think a minute to realize that Stein is weaseling.

“Yes, the government designates many tens of millions as poor, but they almost always have indoor plumbing (which my mother did not have in her small town in the Catskills) and they are super nourished as opposed to mal-nourished,” he said. “They get food stamps. They get free medical care. They get vouchers for many of the needs of life.”

While he pities their plight, Stein pointed out that poverty was greatly reduced in scope and severity in the past century.

“In olden times, poverty was the common human condition,” Stein said. “In the USA, as recently as the Great Depression, poverty was commonplace. FDR might have exaggerated when he described one-third of the nation as ‘ill housed, ill fed and ill clad…’ But surely he was not far off.”

And his mother would be how old? I bet nobody had color tv’s in her day either. And his solution is?

“Maybe, just maybe, if we let God back into the public forum it would help. I have seen spiritual solutions work miracles.”

And in his mother’s day, way back when, when the poor folks were really poor, and not the kind of fake-ass poor we have today—is he saying things were less religious then? Because, unless I’m really mistaken, most conservatives envision the past as being a little less secularized and hippieficated , and way more squared-away, God-fearing, and role-knowing. And yet the really poor folks were back in the day, he says. And his momma did not have indoor plumbing, he also adds.

Thinking about that: Are you saying your momma was godless and self-sabotaging, then, Ben? Because I do not think that proves your point, and you shouldn’t even be talking that smack about your momma. That isn’t decent.

Apparently the far right wants blood and they are doing all of the right things to get them some.

Screeching and fear-mongering over gays in our midst is nothing new for them but those who pay close attention to their antics are recognizing that we have entered a new phase—the mobilization and deployment of armed-to-the-teeth, anti-gay wingnuts who are coming around to a belief that they have a sacred mandate to eliminate the gay.

Guys like Scott Lively have been gay-bashing for a long time and are relatively harmless because their self-interest trumps their desire to scuff their Guccis in the trenches. Up until recently, Lively would rather go to Latvia or Uganda, where he’s a bigger fish, and persuade some petty satraps there to go out and kill their own gays.

He is evidently smart enough to know that the tiny minority of Americans nutty enough to support his agenda will never get much of anything done - at least, legislatively. And Lively’s gay-bashing cottage industry of books, speaking engagements and his hate ministryAbiding Truth Ministries has barely netted enough to keep him in Crown Victorias.

So he’s decided to run for Governor of Massachusetts on a platform that includes “Your President, Barack Obama, Is a Fag.”

Meanwhile, Lively’s book The Pink Swastika has become something of a cult classic in the gay-hate microcosm. The book explains that homosexuals are the true inventors of Nazism and the evil genius behind many Nazi atrocities.

Tuesday, April 08, 2014

There’s this guy, from The Gopher State [State Bird: Common Loon], who was going about his American Dream, minding his own business, raising a family, working hard, getting his MBA on-line, and then—BOOM!

An incident happened! and suddenly, Aaron Miller knew that he must drop everything and get himself elected to Congress to save America from science-crazed, war-on-religion, constitution-shredders wrecking everything.

. . . he shared a story about his daughter becoming very upset because she had to learn about evolution at school. He said his daughter told the teacher that she did not believe in evolution. He said the teacher expressed agreement with his daughter, but told her that they were forced to teach the lesson by the government.

When asked for further detail, Miller declined to provide the name of the teacher in his story.

So, you see, it was a father’s concern for his children that set Mr. Miller on his path to Washington, DC:

There’s a war on our values by the government,” Miller said. “We should decide what is taught in our schools, not Washington, D.C.

As a parent, of course, I can empathize. I remember a similar incident, when my son was in high school. He came home one day fuming and obviously upset, because he told his math teacher he didn’t believe in calculus so he shouldn’t have to pass his class. His teacher agreed that there really was no such thing as calculus but that he wouldn’t get into engineering school unless he played along. Took him a long time to heal . . .

Friday, April 04, 2014

Modern conservatism in the US is predicated on a bizarre, ongoing inversion of reality. Item: an addled B-movie actor explodes the national debt and is lionized as a champion of small government. A cowardly, none-too-bright male cheerleader from a patrician clan is packaged and sold as a brush-clearin,’ neo-Churchillian cowpoke.

The party that bankrupted the country through ruinous, pointless warmongering and Wall Street wilding markets itself as the fiscally responsible foreign policy grownups. The party that allows a gun manufacturer flak organization to intimidate it into allowing terrorists and the floridly crazy to purchase unlimited semiautomatic weapons bills itself as tough on crime. Etc.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that conservatives’ perception of their ongoing defeat in the culture wars is exactly the opposite of reality on every level too. But that doesn’t mean we can’t laugh at the ahistorical ranting. Cue the Powertools, lamenting the resignation of erstwhile Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich:

So the liberals claim another scalp. This is something new in our history, as far as I know. Until now, private citizens could hold whatever political beliefs they wanted, and support political causes as they chose.

Ever heard of the McCarthy hearings? Where a wingnut senator persecuted private citizens and destroyed their livelihoods because of their political beliefs? See, when the party of free markets decides to regulate political beliefs, it does so via the government.

What happened to Eich is a free market phenomenon. You can make the argument that the companies and developers who balked at the prospect of working with a CEO who thinks gays are icky should have given Eich a chance. But the companies and developers are independent agents who are free to vote with their feet because freedom.

Over at Heritage.org, they’ve discovered the power of government policy in leading social change:

Policy should prohibit the government from discriminating against any individual or group, whether nonprofit or for-profit, based on their beliefs that marriage is the union of a man and woman or that sexual relations are reserved for marriage. Policy should prohibit the government from discriminating in tax policy, employment, licensing, accreditation, or contracting against such groups and individuals.

Okay, so you guys were for prohibiting the government from discriminating against same sex couples in tax policy, employment, licensing, accreditation or contracting, right? Nope.

Once again, the self-proclaimed anti-nanny state crusaders and champions of free markets are revealed as sniveling hypocrites. Hoocoodanode?

Wednesday, April 02, 2014

“Being Christians, we don’t pay for drugs that might cause abortions.… something that is contrary to our most important beliefs. It goes against the biblical principles on which we have run this company since day one,” Hobby Lobby founder David Green, in an article for USA Today.

Well, at least since Day One 2012, when Obamacare compelled businesses to include emergency contraception in employee health care plans and David Green, owner of Hobby Lobby, decided to sue the government over that requirement.

Before that, Hobby Lobby’s employee health care plan covered both Plan B and Ella which their brief, filed with the US Supreme Court, describes as “products that can prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus,” which the Greens consider abortion.

Scientist’s refute that statement based on how the drugs actually work—to prevent fertilization, in the first place—nevertheless, it is the Green’s “deeply held religious belief” that the scientists are wrong and that they, the Greens, channeling their God, are right.

Now, some cynics might label the Green’s position somewhat politically-influenced and a whole lot hypocritical. Evidently, the deeply held religious beliefs at the heart of their case struck them rather late in the game—a la Saul on the road to Damascus—knocking them off their ass, when President Obama commanded them to continue doing what they were doing.